When the novelist Chiyo Uno died in 1996 at age 98, she was as extravagantly eulogized for her love life as for her literary work. Four marriages, four divorces, several high-profile love affairs, one attempted love suicide — now that was living! Society disapproved? That should have been her biggest worry. Life in all its forms was there for the seizing, and she would seize it come hell or high water.

In her erotic heyday — the 1920s and '30s — she must have struck those squirming in the straitjacket of a straight-laced society as being far ahead of her time: a model to be imitated if only they had the courage; a living symbol of a liberated future.

But by the sad mid-'90s, the shower of tributes notwithstanding, she already seemed a little passe, and in the first years of the new century, her kind seems almost extinct, not only because society is long past caring how its individual members live their private lives (elected officials and sports celebrities perhaps excepted), but because of the dull, gray solitude that seems to have descended upon the Japanese people.